Apr 18, 2013 3 min read

There is a lot to be said for the immediacy of daily news, but one of the advantages of a monthly publication is that it can help to expose trends in news that occur over a 30-day period.

This month’s Energy Report underscores some of the new directions being mapped out in the energy industry, particularly in oil and gas.

Many of those new directions are being charted here in our region, which has become an energy capital for the country over the past few years.

It seems like only yesterday that a debate was raging over how much natural gas actually existed in the underlying shale strata here. Different government agencies, academians and industry officials provided a wide range of estimates on the potential output of the Marcellus. The tallies produced mostly arguments, but nothing definitive.

But over the past few years, production records out of the Marcellus and many other domestic shale plays have outstripped even some of the most optimistic estimates. Now the abundance of product coming from the shale has kicked off another quarrel about exports.

The debate over how much of America’s growing natural gas reserves should be sold overseas found a local audience earlier this month at Washington & Jefferson College’s second annual Energy Summit conducted by its Center for Energy Policy and Management. Read how panelists representing big chemical producers to those supplying the country’s small communities with natural gas weighed in on the subject.

We also covered last month’s introduction of an unlikely partnership between many of the country’s major environmental groups and several national oil and natural gas producers that has produced a voluntary certification process for drillers in the Marcellus and Utica shales.

Our cover story on Washington Rotating Control Heads demonstrates how past successes in business are often a prelude to future ones, even when the new business can’t be foreseen or predicted. The 40-year-old company was adapting to drilling techniques in unconventional shales long before any work had begun locally in the Marcellus Shale play.

It’s also a story about how business owners must often find ways to adapt to both external and internal changes, some of which are beyond their control.

Returning to the necessity of accounting for things like natural gas and oil output and their importance to U.S. energy security, Jeff Kotula’s column this month questions why the U.S. Department of Energy doesn’t take on a bigger role for all things energy as a more cohesive way for the country to develop an energy policy.

And columnist J.R. Shaw reminds us that the sheer energy of nature has once again triumphed by turning winter into spring, bringing a host of entertainment and activities to fill in your leisure-time calendar.

All of this serves to remind us that business, industry and nature are constantly evolving and that spotting trends helps us define a new direction or season.